People Who Need Punched in the Face: Beta Testers

As you might guess, considering what you’re reading, the name of the site, and how you got here in the first place, I’m privileged enough to receive fairly frequent invitations to either beta or alpha tests for games still in development. I’m sure some of you are, or have been at one time, beta testers on a game of some type. That may have been a pre-release console title, or a new PC game, maybe even an MMO of some sort. For those of you who have been there, done that, gave the feedback and didn’t even get a T-shirt, half of you are going to laugh at the rest of this article and the other half are going to both cry and get really really pissed off. Either way, you’re welcome.

The sad fact is, no matter how many beta tests a developer runs, little things will always slip through. Sometimes it's because they're overlooked, other times it's because the bug can't be reliably reproduced or the cause found.

Until the developers can comb through every line of code, and every interaction of 1's and 0's, there's just no way to put out a completely clean and bug free version.